LibreOffice Viewer for Android Lets You View Any Type of Office File Formats

LibreOffice is a popular open-source office suite. Started as a fork of OpenOffice, LibreOffice is now considered as one of the best alternative of Microsoft Office productivity suite. The Document Foundation backs LibreOffice with the support of volunteers from around the world. The Document Foundation has recently released LibreOffice Viewer for Android. It compliments the desktop productivity suite and lets you view Open Document files and other proprietary document file formats. Let’s see how good is it as document viewer for Android users.

Introducing LibreOffice Viewer for Android

LibreOffice Viewer app requests only one single permission. It just needs access to your photos, media and files only so that it can access the file you want to view.

There are many apps in Google Play Store that lets you view Microsoft Office documents but the number is not that much if you want to view LibreOffice documents. With the release of the official viewer app everything becomes easier. The beta version of LibreOffice Viewer supports Open Document Format (odt, ods and odp), Microsoft Office 2007/2010/2013 (docx, xlsx and pptx) and Microsoft Office 97/2000/XP/2003 (doc, xls and ppt) file formats.

LibreOffice Viewer app for Android uses the same engine as LibreOffice for Windows, OS X and Linux. The combination of LibreOffice engine as back-end and the front-end based on Firefox for Android, you can be sure that this app works perfectly.

How good is LibreOffice Viewer for Android?

While testing the beta app, we viewed few documents and some basic presentations. It did became sluggish when we tried to open a complex presentation file. Since, the app is still in beta, we will ignore the occasional sluggishness. As expected in any beta application it has bugs. Hopefully the developers will fix them before the final version is released.

We will not recommend you to go ahead and replace your existing document viewer with LibreOffice Viewer (beta). For production usage this app is not yet ready but if you want to test it, go ahead, download and install it.

LibreOffice Viewer app is promoted as a reader application but you will be surprised to know that it also offers some basic editing features. LibreOffice Viewer can change words in existing paragraphs and can change font styles. The developers do emphasized that they will enhance the editing feature in the future.

How can you help in the development of LibreOffice Viewer?

This beta app may not be a cup of tea for everyone but you can contribute in the development with your feedbacks. Here’s what the developers have to say, “LibreOffice Viewer also comes with a first preview of the editing functionality, which is considered an experimental feature and not stable enough for mission critical tasks. Feedback and bug reports are very welcome, to help developers improve the quality of the application on its way to a fully fledged editor”. You can report problems, bugs, issues here.

Download LibreOffice Viewer for Android

LibreOffice Viewer for Android is in beta stage. It’s available as a free download from Google Play Store. It works with Android 4.1 and up.